Reckoning
Remember once when it was
as if you possessed angel’s wings
and could fly, fly to anywhere
to worlds real, worlds imagined
such was the buoyancy of youth
with time’s unlimited currency?
Yet now comes the reckoning
so find a temple and prostrate
yourself and pray, pray to any
god that will heed your pleas
as that final destination is nigh
for all those that live must die.
Icarus. The wings of dreams -- Stas Sugint
Athena, the goddess of wisdom, wiped the semen of Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, and metallurgy, from her thigh and thus impregnated Gaia (Earth), leading to the birth of Erechtheus, the founder of Athens. His grandson Daidalos (Daedalus) was an Athenian craftsman credited with inventing carpentry, the axe, the plumb-line, the drill, glue, and isinglass, as well as statues with their feet apart and their eyes open, and even automatons. However, he became jealous of his apprentice, his nephew Talus (or Perdix), who invented the saw and drafting compass. So Daidalos sought to kill him by pushing him off the Acropolis, but Athena transformed him into a pheasant to save his life. The Athenians banished Daidalos by exiling him to Crete. He created ships with masts and sails, as well as the Labyrinth to hold the 1/2man-1/2 bull monster known as the Minotaur, and was rewarded with king Minos' mistress/slave Naucrate; they had a son Ikaros (Icarus). But Daidalos told his fellow Athenian Theseus how to navigate his way through the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, so Minos imprisoned him and Ikaros in a tower. Daidalos collected the feathers in his tower and fastened them together with wax to make 2 pairs of wings. After the father and son flew away from captivity, Ikaros flew too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt, and Icarus fell to his death. In "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" James Joyce had his alter ego Stephen Daedalus describe his future self as "a winged form flying above the waves ... a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve”.
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